It is so difficult to write about our failed governance, power supply, education system, intra and intercity roads when just around the corner the ravage of war tear populations apart where there is no war declared – only ‘emergency’. In medicine, in every other country, except in Nigeria, an ‘emergency’ is a very urgent matter. In the military ‘an emergency’ is a task that must be done with necessary force. After all, the various enemies are equipped with modern weapons of war courtesy of Nigeria’s gunrunners from the uncivil civil war, to the more current Libyans, Chadian jihadists, and Maghreb rebels among others. The weaponry is frightening.

When two guns fire at each other we hear of superior power, ambush, outflanking, fleeing, bullet wounds, blood and death. The dead and the dying lie distorted in or near their graves. We trivialise death even of our neighbours because we are not directly killed or left with a bleeding machete or gunshot wound. Witness a fatal road crash. The main offenders, the commercial vehicles, slow down, pray for themselves, not for the victims and race away at murderous speed above the speed of sound and legal limit, all lessons of the recent dead lost on them. How many fewer lessons will be learnt at a bomb blast scene with body parts and blood and wreckage strewn for hundreds of yards? Compound this with the serial killing of farmers to force them off their land in indigene/settler disputes. Add to that the serial killing of other farmers just to allow passing cows to devour their hard labour produce on the way to the dining tables of millions of carnivorous families, many of whom claim they will ‘die’ if they do not eat meat every day.

But why is that luxury a lethal luxury? Why should fellow Nigerians think that it is their right to kill other fellow Nigerians just to fatten cows of the North-South cattle run? Surely a cow or a herd is severely overpriced if it costs a single human life? How can any sane citizen feed himself, his wife and his children with cow meat that he can see from his daily newspaper costs the life or lives of hundreds of farmers and destruction of the family farm and other property and livelihood every year? If that is not a new form of ‘Mad Cow Disease’ then what is?

In the entire world there is nowhere where such human sacrifice is an acceptable price for an animal’s safe passage to the dining table. It is cannibalism through the backdoor.

We are going to have to call a halt to this mayhem with fasting and praying to reverse this Mad Cow Disease. Nigerians need to begin to ask questions about the origin of their cow meat. Was the trail safe and free of bloodshed? Are these cows ‘ethically’ or ‘fatally’ fattened? We should encourage pre fattening at point of origin and mass transit methods like trailer transport and the train as alternatives to the rampant cycle of murder and retaliation on the farmland/cow tracks borders. Anyone seeking permanent solutions should read Wale Okediran’s Tenants of the House which elegantly tackles this recurrent nightmare. Nigerians should fast from cow meat for one month in the first instance until both cattle tenders and farmers come to their senses. If we stop buying this blood meat, like blood diamonds, the trade will be forced to sanitise itself. Your and my personal greed to have cow meat on our tables must be suppressed in the over-riding national interest to curb this ugly food violence now being capitalised on by ethnic, religious, political and other divisive agenda-seeking groups. How can a cow in your pot be adequate compensation for a farmer, his wife and children being buried beside his yam heaps? Such a prayerful fast is not a boycott, but a responsible act of self-denial in response to a strange paradox –the cow being more valued than the fellow Nigerian!

What country values its cows heading for slaughter more than the backbone of the nation, its farmers? For those who cannot fast from meat, there is always a substitute for cow meat-goat, chicken, fish, sheep, turkey and I am told lizard! All these conflicts are the ingredients put together to make the stew that is Nigeria. For how long will Nigerians extract and pay such a high price, life and death, to eat meat at the table of luxury? We may run out of farmers before we run out of cattle. At the end of the day, and the quicker the better, the Nigerian nation must decide who is more valuable –the farmer and his crops ready for harvest or the cowherd and his cow ready for slaughter -whose slaughter? They may even be socially and politically equal but my medical background tells me Nigeria can survive without cow protein but not without fruit and vegetables, rice, cassava and yam. There are substitutes for cow meat but not for a farmer’s produce? None! Farmers already are facing sufficient challenges and too many have left the job further reducing national land productivity. Should more be killed by herdsmen? We need an emergency ‘Operation Save Our Farmers From Decimation’! Let us fast from cow meat till a truce. If the cows do not die, the farmers will not either. It is new economics ‘Cow-Conomics’